The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company Effect on Urogynecologic Drugs

The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (ie, Cost Plus Drugs) is a service that makes generic drugs affordable. Cortese et al recently published the top 9 most commonly used oral medications in treatment of urologic conditions and showed that Cost Plus Drugs would have provided an estimated $1.29 billion reduction in 2020 costs if they replaced the Medicare prices.

We sought to investigate the savings for all drugs commonly used in urogynecology.

We reviewed the generic drugs provided by Cost Plus Drugs and selected those commonly used for the treatment of urogynecologic conditions (N = 16). For each of the 16 drugs we identified the Cost Plus Drugs prices for the 30- and 90-count quantities. We then also calculated the 2021 Medicare spending for the 16 drugs. The potential savings were calculated as the difference between Cost Plus Drugs and Medicare 30- and 90-count prices, multiplied by the volume-adjusted number of units dispensed to Medicare beneficiaries in 2021.

The total estimated savings when using Cost Plus Drugs compared to Medicare was $462,375,491.53 and $618,833,850.34 for 30- and 90-count pricing, respectively. The price of a 42.5-gram tube of vaginal estrogen cream was $22.48 on Cost Plus Drugs, compared to $293.66 through Medicare Part D.

Cost Plus Drugs is a novel program that has tremendous implications on costs savings in the context of prescription drugs and is particularly true for drugs used in the treatment of urogynecologic conditions, specifically vaginal estrogen.